Touched By Eternity (Mūžības skartie) had its Baltic première at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival 2024
“Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.”
This quote from writer Susan Ertz which opens writer/director Mārcis Lācis’ Touched By Eternity (Mūžības skartie) certainly applies to its protagonist. For although Resnais (Andris Keišs) regularly tunes in online to the vodcast Experiences of Immortality, and even orders packets of yeast in large volume in the belief (gleaned through a wilful misunderstanding of the show) that these will make him live forever, in fact it is hard to see why exactly he would want his life extended beyond its normal span. For this “cowardly, passive, antisocial sluggard” is a middle-aged, balding, slobbish ‘Fatso’ who seems rarely to leave the dingy caravan where he lives all alone – and he might be advised to live in a better fashion what time he has left, rather than just seek more of the same ad infinitum.
What Resnais does not know – even if we do know it from a prologue where a cultish group in a barn hands around a photo of Resnais – is that this ordinary, unassuming schlub is in fact the ‘chosen one’, being pursued for a higher, or at least longer, destiny. When the black-clad Egons (Ivars Krasts) and Carlos (Edgars Samitis) visit him at night in his caravan, they seem to be the answer to all his prayers. For they are offering him precisely the eternal life that he craves. There is of course a catch: they are part of a vampire clan, and while Resnais may initially enjoy the massive high of drinking the human blood that they provide for him, they make it clear that the process cannot be reversed, and that he will soon need to be sourcing his own supply.
Punctuated by pronouncements from the gurus, scientists and academics who guest on the vodcast, Touched by Eternity is a horror comedy preoccupied with precisely those eschatological questions: what gives our finite life its value, and why should we ever compromise on it, or live it by half measures? The buyer’s remorse experienced by Resnais as he is confronted with just how drab and monotonous his existence is, and how much he would rather love the dog-walking Sintija (Inese Pudza) than kill her, will come to define who he is, and actually make him a better person than he was – even if he spends half the film in his bathrobe, looking like a perverse (but generically apt) cross between Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski and Jame “Buffalo Bill” Gumb.
There are lots of surreal touches here: the eternal child Oskars (Mikelis Kreilis) who has, in his prolonged life, ‘been inside’ more men and women than most people would ever dream of; and the vampires listening to lectures on the evolution of their own iconography, or just hanging around together killing time. Killing time is really all Resnais ever does too, so it is not hard to see why he has been chosen to kill a whole lot more – but sometimes less is more, and while Resnais’ reluctance to join them reflects his broader discomfort with the company of others, it also points to a newly acquired moral disapproval of this exploitative, hierarchical lifestyle.
Resnais grows as a character, and part of that growth is a newfound acceptance of the mortal bonds that define our humanity, and limit our monstrosity. In other words, for all its genre trappings, Resnais’ journey is a philosophical one. The only quibble here is that an elaborate ruse executed by Resnais at the end both makes no sense (how exactly did he set it up? and why would his collaborator go through with it?), and fails in any way to advance the plot either, so that it is unclear what its point is beyond narrative padding. Perhaps, though, all the vampire business is similarly mere smoke and mirrors, while what Touched By Eternity is really showing is the price of a wasted life, and the benefits of going out on your own terms, in both style and a blaze of glory.
strap: Writer/director Mārcis Lācis’ vampire comedy explores the pitfalls of a life half lived, or lived too long
© Anton Bitel
